The Art Story: Clement Greenberg vs Harold Rosenberg

http://www.theartstory.org/critics-greenberg-rosenberg.htm[2/24/2012 3:20:51 PM]

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Art Critics Comparison: Clement Greenberg vs. Harold RosenbergMany modern art movements have been supported and promoted by critics who have sought to shape understandings of the artists' work in distinct ways. Abstract Expressionism is notablefor the contributions of two critics, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, who put forward influential interpretations of the movement which were often starkly opposed. The followingchart compares and contrasts their ideas.

GREENBERG THE PERSONALITIES ROSENBERG

Born in New York, the child of first generation Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, ClementGreenberg studied English literature at university, but later gravitated towards writing aboutart. He emerged as a critic in the pages of the so-called 'little magazines' that gave voice toNew York's intellectuals, and his first major essay was "Avant-garde and Kitsch," whichwas published in Partisan Review in 1939. From 1942 until 1949 he served as art critic forThe Nation, beginning a period of nearly thirty years during which Greenberg devotedhimself almost exclusively to writing about visual art.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, Harold Rosenberg earned a law degree before gravitatingtowards the circles of New York bohemians and intellectuals. Like Greenberg, he too wrotefor the 'little magazines,' and for many years he ranged more widely over culture than hisrival, but his few early contributions to art criticism made him famous, and from 1967-1978he served as art critic of The New Yorker.

"'AMERICAN-TYPE' PAINTING" (1955) KEY ESSAYS "THE AMERICAN ACTION PAINTERS" (1952)

Clement Greenberg's essay "'American-Type' Painting" was first published in PartisanReview in 1955. It reappeared in his 1961 collection of essays, Art and Culture.

In some respects "'American-Type' Painting' was prompted by Greenberg's desire to counterthe increasing popularity of the ideas that Rosenberg had launched, in 1952, with "TheAmerican Action Painters." It represents one of his central statements about thedevelopment of modern art. It tackles the development of Abstract Expressionism; it arguesfor the radicalism of color field painting - relating it to Impressionism rather than Cubism;and argues that modern art evolved while pursuing ever greater pictorial flatness.

The title of the essay suggests Greenberg's discomfort with the term 'AbstractExpressionism,' which he believed was "inaccurate." However, although he borrowed theessay's title from a phrase that British critics had used to speak of recent American painting,he was generally happy to refer to the movement as Abstract Expressionism.

Harold Rosenberg's essay "The American Action Painters," first appeared in Art News in1952, and was republished in his 1959 collection of essays, The Tradition of the New.

The essay interpreted new American art along broadly existential lines. Painters, Rosenbergwrote, were now treating the canvas as an "arena in which to act..What was to go on thecanvas was not a picture but an event."

"The American Action Painters" did much to establish Rosenberg's reputation as a critic,and ultimately brought him an important following among other critics and artists such asLawrence Alloway, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Goldwater. However, much of his argumentcontradicted Greenberg's reading of painting, which saw the formal qualities of the art workas crucial, and also understood American painting as an integral part of an unfoldingtradition of modern painting stretching back to Manet. It thus laid the basis for a long-standing and oftentimes bitter rivalry between Greenberg and Rosenberg.

ABSTRACTION Vs. ACTION

Greenberg viewed abstraction as a characteristic facet of modern painting, for if art was tobe authentically modern, each medium had to pursue a process of rationalisation whichwould progressively disentangle it from other, related mediums. Indeed, it was alsoincreasingly a necessary facet of modern painting, since art was being threatened by theintrusion of clichés, ideology and commerce.

Figurative art, and the sorts of anecdotal subjects that were common of American paintingin the 1930s, were, for Greenberg, typical of the kind of extraneous, 'literary' material whichneeded to be excluded from painting. The goal was an abstraction which referred back topainting itself, and disavowed any reference to the external world - for Greenberg, thiswould be epitomised by the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock.

Rosenberg' emphasis on the creative act - at the expense of the formal aspects of an artwork- meant that abstraction was a less important quality for him than for Greenberg. However,that is not to say that his tastes were broader than his rival's - in fact, though Rosenberg hadbeen careful, in "The American Action Painters," not to single out any painters as examplesof his concept of 'action painting', the phrase implicitly championed gestural abstraction ofonly a few artists (it was less useful in describing color field painters such as Newman,Rothko, and Still.) If Greenberg's opinions led him to value Pollock above all, Rosenberg'slead him to celebrate de Kooning as well as others such as Motherwell and Kline.

FORMALIST POSITION EXISTENTIALIST

Greenberg's approach to art criticism was avowedly formalist. He believed that althoughform was not the total of art, it offered the only firm basis on which to make bothjudgements of quality and assessments about the relative character of different works of art.He even argued that was so easy to make contradictory assertions about subject matter inart, that it any discussion of subject was without purpose.

Although Rosenberg contributed to similar magazines as Greenberg in the 1930s, he cameto art criticism later, and his outlook was shaped in part by working alongside SamuelKootz in organising the exhibition The Intrasubjectives in 1949. This shaped his interest insubjective, mythical, and existential ideas, and these went on to be important in hiscriticism.

GREENBERG AFTER ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM ROSENBERG

As the 1950s unfolded, Greenberg began to feel that the gestural abstraction which hadcharacterized the innovative work of de Kooning and others in the late 1940s was beginningto degenerate into a school or a manner - what he termed "the Tenth Street touch," after thearea in New York where the painters gathered. This led him to place more importance on

Rosenberg was the dominant critic in the 1950s, the critic who offered the most popular andcompelling description of gestural abstraction, and whose writing inspired a new generationof gestural painters such as Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan. However, his primacy wasthreatened towards the end of the decade by the increasing importance of color field

Clement Greenberg:Detail View

Harold Rosenberg:Detail View

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The Art Story: Clement Greenberg vs Harold Rosenberg

http://www.theartstory.org/critics-greenberg-rosenberg.htm[2/24/2012 3:20:51 PM]

the work of color field painters, who he argued were pursuing a more radical deconstructionof the traditional easel picture. He first elaborated these ideas in his essay "American-TypePainting," and pushed them further in "After Abstract Expressionism," and in theintroduction to an exhibition he curated in 1964, Post-painterly Abstraction.

painting, for which Greenberg began to argue strongly. Inevitably, having praised gesturalabstraction so much, Rosenberg was not a champion of post-painterly styles, and he arguedthat it resembled abstract art theory, rather than abstract art in practice. By the 1960s,Rosenberg's position was further threatened by the attacks of younger critics on the artistthat was often taken to be the epitome of action painting, Willem de Kooning: manybelieved his work was conservative in its recourse to figuration and post-Cubist space.

GREENBERG ON ROSENBERG ON THEIR OPPONENTS ROSENBERG ON GREENBERG

Privately, Rosenberg and Greenberg are said to have come close to fist fights on a couple ofoccasions. In public - or on the page - they were more circumspect, though Greenberg madeno secret of his contempt for Rosenberg's writing. His most famous attack on his rival camein his 1962 essay "How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name," in which he slyly remarked thathe had never wanted to comment on the apparent subject matter of artworks (as Rosenbergwas wont to do), since he found that he could easily assert the opposite and feel on equallysafe ground - so slippery was subject matter as a grounds for discussion. He argued that theonly true, solid grounds for assessment of works of art - for judging their quality, and forassessing their contribution to modern art - was to discuss form alone.

Ten years after Rosenberg published "The American Action Painters," he penned anotheressay for Art News entitled "Action Painting: A Decade of Distortion," in which he hit backat Greenberg. He argued that his rival's focus on form was academic, and ignored theimportance of the historic rupture that had come about with the advent of action painting. Healso attacked the roles Greenberg had increasingly come to fill in the 1960s as an advisor toprominent galleries.

AGAINST STANCE ON WILLEM DE KOONING'S WOMAN FOR

Although Greenberg never directly commented on de Kooning's shift into figuration withthe Women series, his silence has long been taken as a sign of his disapproval. In any case,his supporters gave voice to his view in the 1960s as they increasingly attacked deKooning's style as conservative.

Although Rosenberg was never associated with de Kooning in the same way as Greenbergwas associated with support for Jackson Pollock, Rosenberg stood squarely behind thepainter who most clearly embodied his notion of action painting.

HISTORICAL PHENOMENON STANCE ON MODERNISM THE AVANT-GARDE

Greenberg began to evolve a historical understanding of the origins and development ofModernism as early as the 1930s, and elaborated it - and at times significantly altered it - inthe following decades. He saw modern art as driven forward by a need to entrench itsindividual media more solidly in their own particular areas of competence. In the medium ofpainting, this encouraged increasing abstraction, since everything that was extraneous to themedium had to be purged from it. In particular, it encouraged moves towards pictorialflatness, since Greenberg saw the flatness of the canvas support as the overriding fact of themedium.

Rosenberg regarded Greenberg's attention to the historical character of modernism asacademic, and, unlike his rival, who saw a continuity between recent American art andolder modern painting, Rosenberg believed that the Abstract Expressionists had broughtabout a radical break with all that had gone before by treating the canvas in a new way ("asan arena in which to act.."). In this respect, Rosenberg understood Abstract Expressionismas pursuing the dream of earlier avant-gardes - like Dada and Surrealism - of integrating artwith life. In contrast, Greenberg saw the avant-garde as threatening the death of art.

FORMALISM AND MODERNISM LASTING LEGACY PAINTING AND PERFORMANCE

Greenberg's writing sought to elucidate the development of modern art, and to demonstratethat a logic governed the progress from one movement to the next. Although his premiseswere often challenged - and many of his arguments are now discredited - the rigor that hebrought to the criticism of art, both in terms of the practical analysis of individual works,and in terms of historical perspective, has had a huge impact both on art history and on artitself.

Although Greenberg's legacy has been immeasurably more fruitful for art history thanRosenberg's, the latter not only left behind one of the most useful and persuasivedescriptions of Abstract Expressionism, but also sowed the seeds of new understandings ofpainting. In arguing that artists such as de Kooning had transformed the canvas into an"arena in which to act," Rosenberg encouraged a rethinking of the act of painting. Thiswould be picked up by Allan Kaprow in 1958 when he suggested that Pollock's might havean important legacy for performance art, and in more recent times the idea has echoedcontemporary artists attempts to further expand the medium of painting beyond theboundaries of the traditional canvas.

GREENBERG TASTES IN ART ROSENBERG

Composition inBrown and Gray

Man with aGuitar

One Year theMilkweed

Number 1 The Gate

Piet Mondrian Georges Braque Arshile Gorky Jackson Pollock Hans Hofmann

Red Balloon Trafalgar Square Girl Before aMirror

Egg Beater No. 4 Woman I

Paul Klee Piet Mondrian Pablo Picasso Stuart Davis Willem deKooning

CONSEQUENTIAL ESSAYS

"Avant-Garde and Kitsch" Partisan Review, 1939

"The Crisis of the Easel Picture" Partisan Review, 1948

"Modernist Painting" Originally delivered as a radio broadcast on The Voice of America Forum Lectures: The

Visual Arts, 1960

"After Abstract Expressionism" Art International, 1962

"'American-Type' Painting" Partisan Review, 1955

"The Fall of Paris" Art News , 1940

"The American Action Painters" Art News , 1952

"Parable of American Painting" Art News , 1953

"Revolution and the Concept of Beauty" The Tradition of the New, 1959

"Pop Culture: Kitsch Criticism" The Tradition of the New, 1959

INFLUENCES CHART

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(c) The Art Story Foundation - All rights Reserved For more movements, artists and ideas on Modern Art visit www.TheArtStory.org

The Art Story: Clement Greenberg vs Harold Rosenberg

http://www.theartstory.org/critics-greenberg-rosenberg.htm[2/24/2012 3:20:51 PM]

(c) The Art Story Foundation - All rights Reserved For more movements, artists and ideas on Modern Art visit www.TheArtStory.org